Support For Teaching History Has Fallen Short

October 01, 2007|By BENTLEY BOYD, bxboyd@dailypress.com | 342-8812

WILLIAMSBURG — What's a historian's favorite joke?

Q: What's the name of the History teacher in an American high school?

A: "Coach."

That joke showed up again a few Sundays ago in a New York Times story about History museums. Whenever a specialist wants to point to the trouble with Americans' historical understanding, he or she points to the schools.

"Students do not understand as much about the founding of our nation as they used to," says Ann Phillips Bay, associate director of education at George Washington's Mount Vernon, in a typical version of this refrain.

Teachers are used to getting the blame for society's problems, but today's social studies teacher has a particularly lonely post. The federal No Child Left Behind law doesn't test History, so there is little money coming from the federal and state governments for History education. And thus local school districts and principals shave away the minutes that can be spent on social studies instruction by insisting teachers spend more time on the things that are tested, such as reading and math.

Many elementary teachers don't feel prepared to teach History anyway. They are trained in school on the methods of teaching, but not much of the broad range of content they will have to teach. This produces teachers in Virginia who confess to not knowing who Robert E. Lee was or why they have to teach him on the Virginia Studies part of the state's Standards of Learning.

A 2005 national survey of social studies teachers found only 17 percent of fifth-grade teachers had more than 10 courses in History or the social sciences while they were undergraduate students themselves. Only 10 percent of second grade teachers had more than 10 courses in History as undergraduates.

The same survey asked teachers what their greatest needs were for professional development. Of eight choices, the top two were: to learn how to present content better and to learn more subject matter themselves.

"Basically, anybody can end up in a History classroom. In Texas, a lot of times it's the football coach," said Linda Salvucci, a History professor at Trinity University in Texas.

The 1990s wave of state standards was meant to correct that. Almost every state put into law a set of classroom goals for teachers and students to meet. The hope was that the standards would point the way for struggling teachers. If tests showed the teachers and students weren't meeting the goals, bad teachers could be weeded out.

Virginia's Standards of Learning have some of the longest curriculum lists in the nation. In some cases the detailed roadmap led to more bad teaching, said Jeremy Stoddard, a professor in the education school at the College of William and Mary.

"There's so much to review that teachers simply lecture or use flashcards to cover it all. They're just spitting facts out at students," he said. "The SOLs are supposed to be the low bar and you go beyond them in class. But teachers are teaching to the testable items and not to the whole social studies SOLs."

Sherry Cashwell has taught since 1978, most of that time in South Carolina. She likes how her state has continually revised its social studies standards since they were first adopted in 1998, to make more clear what the students need to know.

"I don't have a big problems with the standards. It's a much better guideline than teaching a textbook. A textbook naturally leaves some things out. The standards give me a chance to use a wide variety of methods, as long as I eventually address the standard," said Cashwell, a seventh-grade teacher at Summit Parkway Middle School in Columbia, S.C.

Her classroom has an interactive whiteboard known as a "SMART board" for multimedia presentations and 25 computers, on which her students play games about world geography at a Great Britain Web site.

And yet she returned to this low-tech ditty to teach the Christopher Columbus date: "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." She teaches three classes pulled from the same pool of students, and for some reason two of her classes didn't catch on to the lyric, but one class did.

For some teachers, computers and technology haven't changed age-old patterns. Now some teachers comfortable with teaching-through-lecture just read their script off a PowerPoint show -- packing in even more text and more facts.

Ken Sklar, a social studies teacher at Radnor High School in a Philadelphia suburb, will use a PowerPoint presentation with a new audience at a one-time lecture. But he said PowerPoint would detract from his own preparation for working in a classroom with a group of students over several months.

"If I make a PowerPoint, I'm taking time away from my own reading and research. Will a PowerPoint make a qualitative difference to my students?" he said. "I'm not sure that just because a technology exists, it's necessarily better."